No matter if your business is single site or national chain, if you don’t know how to meet your customers’ needs, you’re going to fall. Case in point: Wal-Mart.

Although the behemoth retailer is far from going belly up, it has failed to drive up its apparel sales with clothing lines sponsored by celebrities and has released its US division apparel chief after realizing its apparel program wasn’t walking a straight line; it was more wobbling down the runway.

After introducing trendy outfits and lines sponsored by the likes of Miley Cirus and Max Azria while still carrying bulk packs of tube socks and T-shirts, Wal-Mart’s attempt to compete with rival Target only led to a decrease in clothing sales. At the end of the company’s fiscal year on January 31, sales were down 11% compared to the previous year.

“Wal-Mart has suffered from now knowing who they want to be,” said Allen Questrom, former chief executive of JC Penny who recently left Wal-Mart’s board. “They’re either trying to be too fashionable or too basic.”

Over the years, Wal-Mart has acted as a retail leader, often setting standards that others follow and try to mimic. These circumstances again beg the question: what can retailers learn from these oversights?

1. Know your market. Wal-Mart is often looked at as the place to go for savings, not necessarily style. A strong combination of both could’ve produced better results for the retailer, according to Kelly Tackett, a retail analyst at Kandar Retail. She told The Wall Street Journal that if Wal-Mart had seized the opportunity to bring in more fashionable everyday apparel, its sales results could’ve been much different.
2. Don’t throw caution to the wind; rather, carefully walk the line. New apparel chief Lisa Rhodes joined Wal-Mart’s clothing team in January. The challenge for Rhodes will be to find harmony between the “boring basics and overly glitzy” clothing styles that strategists in the past couldn’t.

The company believes it has the right team in place to take it from pursuing high fashion at low costs, what Eduardo Castro-Wright, who in June stepped down as CEO of Wal-Mart’s US stores division to become vice chair and chief executive of Walmart’s Global.com, called “still chasing too much glitter.”


Spokesperson David Tovar said Wal-Mart has “the right team in place to lead the apparel business forward” and that the retailer is “listening to what our customers want and speaking with all key suppliers and letting them know we’re working in a collaborative way.”